Christopher Buckley

I had some adventures at the White House, but hardly enough to fill a full memoir.

As for the financial world - I've been working in the Forbes building for eight years. You soak up a little bit of ambient stuff about all this - I know what a gold straddle is, what the Lombard rate is.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

I once spoke to 9,000 people, but they managed to fit them all into a structure that resembled a Zeppelin hangar, so it was a contained space in which whatever laughter I generated could ricochet and hang around for a bit, encouraging others to join in.

I think people assumed because of my last name that I was a real right-winger. And if you cared to look at my writing, you would be hard pressed to deduce that I'm an ideological right-winger.

American voters tend to make their decisions based on a variety of vectors. Professional political satirists employ rather more scientific criteria. Namely: who will provide us with better material over the next four years?

With real estate, it's location, location, location. In public speaking, it's acoustics, acoustics, acoustics.

In public relations, you live with the reality that not every disaster can be made to look like a misunderstood triumph.

Pop was a devout Roman Catholic; I'm a lapsed Catholic. I'm not the village atheist, but I exert my right not to believe, and I doubt I would have been very public about that were he still alive, simply just so as not to hurt his feelings.

I cast my first vote on my father's lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.

I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.

We make our public servants jump through quite a few hoops, you know. We get hysterical if they accept a $50 lunch from a lobbyist. We get hysterical if they accept a ride on some corporate jet.